"Harlequin" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Guard who came after the royal carriage out-Heroded Herod by their deafening cries of loyalty. Who would have imagined these gentlemen would have played the harlequin and receive their dethroned Emperor as they did when he entered Paris again? "Put not your trust in men, particularly Frenchmen in 1814, O ye house of Bourbon, for they made ye march out of France without beat ...
— A Sailor of King George • Frederick Hoffman
... with a black footman, or boatswain, or some such thing; but the world's so censorious. There's old Doctor Hoskins of Bath, who attended poor dear Drum in the quinsy; and poor dear old Fred Hoskins, the gouty General: I remember him as thin as a lath in the year '84, and as active as a harlequin, and in love with me—oh, how he ...
— The History of Samuel Titmarsh - and the Great Hoggarty Diamond • William Makepeace Thackeray
... much we felt we were masters of the type, and so almost sufficiently was that a stop-gap for London constantly deferred. We hadn't the transformation-scene, it was true, though what this really seemed to come to was clown and harlequin taking liberties with policemen—these last evidently a sharp note in a picturesqueness that we lacked, our own slouchy "officers" saying nothing to us of that sort; but we had at Niblo's harlequin and columbine, albeit of less pure a tradition, and we knew ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... for a baby harlequin, this cap? Made of gray stuff, with peaks of green and black fustian, and a bedtick lining!" This description of the cap was ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... prognosticate the declining taste for the Ullaloo in Ireland. In a comic theatrical entertainment, represented not long since on the Dublin stage, a chorus of old women was introduced, who set up the Irish howl round the relics of a physician, who is supposed to have fallen under the wooden sword of Harlequin. After the old women have continued their Ullaloo for a decent time, with all the necessary accompaniments of wringing their hands, wiping or rubbing their eyes with the corners of their gowns or aprons, etc., one of the mourners suddenly suspends her lamentable ...
— Castle Rackrent • Maria Edgeworth
... meant laughter," said Thackeray, in his essay on the English humorists, "you would scarcely feel more interest about humorous writers than the life of poor Harlequin, who possesses with these the power of making you laugh. But the men regarding whose lives and stories you have curiosity and sympathy appeal to a great number of our other faculties, besides our mere sense of ridicule. The humorous writer professes to awaken and direct your ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... and fool, most valiant in words, but constantly being drubbed by Harlequin. Scaramouch is a common character in Italian farce, originally meant in ridicule of the Spanish don, and therefore dressed in Spanish costume. Our clown is an imbecile old idiot, and wholly unlike the dashing poltroon of Italian pantomime. The ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... his Geraldine, but that he is to open his eyes to see her! That he may see, you will give him a light; and I command him not to extinguish it so long as Geraldine is with him. Otherwise he may confound her with another woman; for in the dark one cannot distinguish even a harlequin from a queen!'—You have now to decide, my lord, whether this lady remains with you, or whether she goes, and the light shall ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach
... He was looking up at a window, with a couple of sooty scarlet geraniums in it. This was the court where Dame Dutton dwelt. He glided up her narrow stair and let himself in by the latch; and with his cane made a smacking like a harlequin's sword upon the old woman's deal table, crying: 'Mrs. Dutton; Mrs. Dutton. Is Mrs. ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... out came the Spider, with finger so fine, To show his dexterity on the tight line. From one branch to another his Cobwebs he slung, Then quick as an arrow he darted along; But just in the middle,—Oh! shocking to tell, From his rope in an instant poor Harlequin fell. Yet he touch'd not the ground, but with talons outspread Hung suspended in air, at the end of a thread. Then the Grasshopper came with a jerk and a spring; Very long was his Leg, though but short was his Wing: He took but three leaps, and was ...
— The Peacock 'At Home' AND The Butterfly's Ball AND The Fancy Fair • Catherine Ann Dorset
... "I regret to say that another change has overtaken us. Have you ever heard of 'harlequin fate'? 'Tis a very buffoon of mischief and irony that is often permitted to dog our earthly footsteps and prevent us from becoming too content with our lot. For a time you and I, little maid, good comrades though we have been, must tread different paths. ...
— Mary Louise • Edith van Dyne (one of L. Frank Baum's pen names)
... Drury, imitated life Quite to the life. The elephant in Blue Beard, Stuffed by his hand, wound round his lithe proboscis As spruce as he who roared in Padmanaba. [Footnote: "Padmanaba," viz., in a pantomime called Harlequin in Padmanaba. This elephant, some years afterward, was exhibited over Exeter 'Change, where it was found necessary to destroy the poor animal by discharges of musketry. When he made his entrance in the pantomime above-mentioned, Johnson, the machinist ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... a mouth shaped like a bud reluctant to open, blew him a kiss. Then came a cue of music like an avalanche, and quicker than Harlequin's wink the aisle ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... arcana of any public theatre? You see here, behind the ostensible scenery, all the crooked working of the machinery developed and laid open to the world. You now see by what secret movement the master of the mechanism has conducted the great Indian opera,—an opera of fraud, deceptions, and harlequin tricks. You have it all laid open before you. The ostensible scene is drawn aside; it has vanished from your sight. All the strutting signors, and all the soft signoras are gone; and instead of a brilliant ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... had six lovely little harlequin cups on a side-shelf in her china closet, and six different-patterned breakfast plates, with colored borders to match the cups; rose, and brown, and gray, and vermilion, and green, and blue. These were all the real china she had, and ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... not singular to find an harlequin at the court of Attila? Yet such is the origin of these buffoons. The colour of the black slaves, the strangeness of their face and manners, caused them to be sought after as excellent ministers of mirth; to complete the singularity, Zercho asks his wife at the hands of Attila, closely paralleling ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 70, March 1, 1851 • Various
... literature, no other sort of book admits of such variety of topics, style, and treatment as the novel. As diverse in talent and quality as the story-teller himself,—now harlequin, now gossip, now threnodist,—with weird ghostliness, moping melancholy, uncouth laughter, or gentle serious smile,—now relating the story, with childlike interest in it, now with a good heart and now with a bad heart ridiculing mankind, now allegorical with rich meanings, now freighting ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... aware of the great dangers of that common foible, vanity! And yet it is the light feather that wings many a poisoned dart; it is the harlequin leader of a vile crew of evils. Generally, vanity is looked upon as merely a harmless weakness, whose only penalty is ridicule; but examine its true character, and you will find it to be one of the most dangerous, and at the same time ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... Joue, Act ii, 4, of Cyrano de Bergerac (1654). What is practically a translation of Les Fourberies de Scapin by Otway, was produced at the Duke's Theatre in 1677, and in the same year Ravenscroft included a great part of it in his Scaramouch a Philosopher, Harlequin a Schoolboy, Bravo, Merchant, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... sundry passages of Scripture were piously portrayed: Tobit and his dog figured to great advantage; Haman swung conspicuously on his gibbet; and Jonah appeared most manfully bouncing out of the whale, like Harlequin through ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... very portly man who had passed the maturity of manhood, but active as Harlequin. He had a well-favoured countenance; fair, good-humoured, but very sly. He was dressed like the head butler of the London Tavern, and was particular as to his white waistcoats and black silk stockings, punctilious as to his knee-buckles, ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... humor seized Packy, or some stage in the game made such action desirable, he would leap the barrier, and jumping up and down like a harlequin in front of the bleacher benches, start his cohort into a combined school yell that must make the hot blood leap through the veins of everyone who called Chester his or ...
— Jack Winters' Gridiron Chums • Mark Overton
... in each politer Age, Triumphant, rear'd the Trophies of the Stage: But only Farce, and Shew, will now go down, And Harlequin's the Darling of ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... with the Foreign Office, again, one still less knows. Seizures of Sapienza, and the like sudden appearances of Britain in the character of Hercules-Harlequin, waving, with big bully-voice, her huge sword-of-sharpness over field-mice, and in the air making horrid circles (horrid catherine-wheels and death-disks of metallic terror from said huge sword), to see how they will like it,—do from time to time astonish ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... delight. Then she turned upon Anthony eyes swimming with tenderness, put up consoling lips.... The entrance of Polichinelle, however, cudgel and all, in the shape of a little white dog, dragging a bough with him, spoiled her game. Harlequin Sun, too, flashed out of hiding—before his cue, really, for the shower ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... Bartlemy fair? If you have, you may have seen—nay, you must have seen—Richardson's immortal show. You must have seen a tall platform in front of the migratory edifice, and on that platform you must have delighted your visual orb with the clown, the pantaloon, the harlequin, the dancing ladies, the walking dandy, the king with his crown, the queen in her rabbit-skin robes, the smock-frocked countryman, the top-booted jockey, and all the dramatis personae of the performance that every moment of every day, during every fair, is for ever "going to begin." ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... polite letters, by publishing an ambitious allegorical poem of the age of chivalry, entitled "Hermin and Gunilde," which was not only exceedingly well reviewed, but received the honour of a parody entitled "Harlequin and Columbine." He also wrote translations of several of the poems of Ossian, and a disquisition upon their genuineness; and then with better inspiration he wrote a considerable treatise on "Percy's Reliques of Ancient Poetry," with ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... Then out came the Spider, with finger so fine, To show his dexterity on the tight-line, From one branch to another his cobwebs he slung, Then quick as an arrow he darted along, But just in the middle—oh! shocking to tell, From his rope, in an instant, poor Harlequin fell. Yet he touch'd not the ground, but with talons outspread, Hung suspended in air, at the end of ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... by side, raged round the field like Castor and Pollux, and sturdy Ben Jonson enacted more wonders than when a volunteer with the army in Flanders. As to the dapper little compiler of farragos mentioned some time since, he had arrayed himself in as many patches and colors as harlequin, and there was as fierce a contention of claimants about him, as about the dead body of Patroclus. I was grieved to see many men, to whom I had been accustomed to look up with awe and reverence, fain to steal off with scarce a rag to cover their nakedness. Just then my eye ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... Mud clown, character clown, harlequin, fat boy, jester, funny rustic, vied with each other in mirth-provoking antics so aptly described by the circus press agent as a "merry-hodgepodge of fun-provoking, acrobatic idiosyncrasies of an ...
— The Circus Boys In Dixie Land • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... vegetables are the well-known green cabbage-worm, the harlequin cabbage-bug, the cabbage hairworm, the asparagus-beetle, the squash-bug, the squash-vine borer, the striped cucumber or melon beetle, the melon aphis, the corn boll-worm, the ...
— Checking the Waste - A Study in Conservation • Mary Huston Gregory
... shadowy form that lifelessly clings to it? It is a delicate membrane, thin and light; see, I blow it away. You saw the split in the back, through which the former tenant left the abode. It is the cast-off skin of the green drake, now metamorphosed into a creature more active than harlequin or columbine, the male into a dark brown insect, with gauze-like wings, the female into a beautiful creature, with body marbled white and brown, and able to fly well and strongly, now high in the air, now sailing along close to the surface of the water, ever and anon ...
— Country Walks of a Naturalist with His Children • W. Houghton
... or in company with a danseuse, how could they help being friends? If des Lupeaulx had not been a general-secretary he would certainly have been a journalist. Thus, in that fifteen years' struggle in which the harlequin sabre of epigram opened a breach by which insurrection entered the citadel, des Lupeaulx never received ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... the room. Fenn had upset one chair and the noise had nearly deafened him. Now chairs seemed to be falling in dozens. Bang! Bang! Crash!! (two that time). And then somebody shot through the window like a harlequin and dashed away across the lawn. Fenn could hear his footsteps thudding on the soft turf. And at the same moment other footsteps made ...
— The Head of Kay's • P. G. Wodehouse
... long vase-like glass of the past for champagne), a beautiful Bohemian green glass, apparently set with gems, for the hock, a ruby-red glass for the claret, two other large white claret or Burgundy glasses, and three wine-glasses of cut or engraved glass. Harlequin glasses, which give to the table the effect of a bed of tulips, are in fashion for those who delight in ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... is dubbed clown or harlequin, so peculiar are his antics or somersaults in the air; and by others "mischief maker," because of his ventriloquistic and imitating powers, and the variety of his notes. In the latter direction he is surpassed ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [December, 1897], Vol 2. No 6. • Various
... would a rabid dog, a pretty little red-and-black banded serpent about as thick as your thumb. If any living creature whose habitat is the United States deserves the epithet "deadly," it is the Elaps. Two species are known; the harlequin snake, which ranges throughout the Gulf states to Texas and up the Mississippi River to Ohio, and the Sonoran coral snake, found in the Southwest only. By a strange perversion of facts, while the harmless hog-nosed snake enjoys a repute of terror, the Elaps, most dangerous of all American ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... consist, what services does it perform, what is its business, and what are its merits? Doth the virtue consist in the metaphor or in the man? Doth the goldsmith that makes the crown make the virtue also? Doth it operate like Fortunatus's wishing-cap or Harlequin's wooden sword? Doth it make a man a conjurer? In fine, what is it? It appears to be a something going much out of fashion, falling into ridicule, and rejected in some countries both as unnecessary and expensive. In America it is considered as an absurdity; and in France ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... recurred in Mrs. Barton's thoughts as she reviewed the situation, her head leaned in the pose of the most plaintive of the pastels that Lord Dungory had commissioned his favourite artist to execute in imitation of the Lady Hamilton portraits. And now, his finger on his lip, like harlequin glancing after columbine, the old gentleman, who had entered ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... or overt guise, seemed to haunt Pierston just at this time with undignified mockery which savoured rather of Harlequin than of the torch-bearer. Two days after parting in a lone island from the girl he had so disinterestedly loved he met in Piccadilly his friend Somers, wonderfully spruced up, and hastening along with a ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... early predilection for Music; Mozart, we know, did. They say Holmes has published a very good life of M. Only think of the poor fellow not being able to sell his music latterly, getting out of fashion, so taking to drink . . . and enact Harlequin at Masquerades! When I heard Handel's Alexander's Feast at Norwich this Autumn I wondered; but when directly afterward they played Mozart's G minor Symphony, it seemed as if I had passed out of a land of ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... ropes were being cast off, Jolivet appeared, tearing along. The steamer was already sheering off, the gangway had been drawn onto the quay, but Alcide Jolivet would not stick at such a little thing as that, so, with a bound like a harlequin, he alighted on the deck of the Caucasus almost ...
— Michael Strogoff - or, The Courier of the Czar • Jules Verne
... chocolate, punch, peach, almond, and in short every species of gratification of this kind; while the glasses are filled to a great height, in a pyramidal shape, and some of them with layers of strawberry, gooseberry, and other coloured ice—looking like pieces of a Harlequin's jacket—are seen moving to and fro, to be silently and certainly devoured by those who bespeak them. Add to this, every one has his tumbler and small water-bottle by the side of him: in the centre of the bottle is a large piece of ice, and with a tumbler of water, poured out from it, the ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... means of setting it off with lustre, and ought to engross but little attention; as it is more important to hear what a character speaks, than to observe the place where he stands; but now the case is altered. The scenes in a Harlequin Sorcerer, and other unmeaning pantomimes, unknown to our more elegant and judging fore-fathers, procure crowded houses, while the noblest strokes of Dryden, the delicate touches of Otway and Rowe, the wild majesty of Shakespear, ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... of the stage are benches. The curtain is composed of two tapestries which can be drawn aside. Above a harlequin's mantle are the royal arms. There are broad steps from the stage to the hall; on either side of these steps are the places ...
— Cyrano de Bergerac • Edmond Rostand
... jester? He is one, Who behind the scenes hath been, Caught Life with his make-up off, Found him but a harlequin Cast to play a tragic part— And the two ...
— The Broadway Anthology • Edward L. Bernays, Samuel Hoffenstein, Walter J. Kingsley, Murdock Pemberton
... leg in return for a simple visit which was perhaps prompted by no evil intention. Each for herself in her own stronghold. But let a parasite appear, meditating foul play: that's a very different thing. She can wear the trappings of Harlequin or of a church-beadle; she can be the Clerus-beetle, in wing-cases of vermilion with blue trimmings, or the Dioxys-bee, with a red scarf across her black abdomen, and the mistress of the house will let her ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... his staff,—a popinjay set of rascals dressed out in green and gold, and with more plumes and feathers than the general staff ever boasted. Carried away by momentary passion at the failure of my reconnaissance, I burst out with some insolent allusion to the harlequin assembly which had drawn the French fire upon us. Monsoon saluted me respectfully, and retired without a word; but I had scarcely reached my quarters when a 'friend' of his waited on me with a message, a very categorical message it was, too, 'it must be a meeting or an ample apology.' I ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... upon the little platform that represented a stage bounded a sort of anomalous being, supple and charming, in the traditional dress of Pierrot, whom the English vulgarize and call Harlequin. He had white camellias instead of buttons on his loose white jacket, and the bright eyes of Wanda shone out from his red-and-white face. He held a mandolin, and imitated the most charming of serenades, before a make-believe ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... take any liberty, without fear of dethronement. One evening, during an act in which he had not to appear on the stage, he was leaning while chatting with a comrade against that part of the wings known in French as "harlequin's cloak"—in our stage language the prompt-place. A brass knob was under his elbow. "What's this machine for?" he said, examining it. "Don't touch it, Monsieur Frederic," cried an employe: "it's the gas-regulator." "Bah! has ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... the garment may have been called at the time, is so strangely illustrated that the right-hand side of the forepart is obviously the left-hand side of the backpart; and so gives a harlequin appearance to the figure, which it is not unnatural to assume was intentional, and done ...
— Bacon is Shake-Speare • Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence
... Bucco, and Pappus; the first of these is prefixed to the special title, e.g. Maccus miles, Maccus virgo. He seems to have been a personage with an immense head, who, corresponding to our clown or harlequin, came in for many hard knocks, but was a general favourite. Pappus took the place of pantaloon, and was the ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... churches and republics of history, is also true of the most trivial parlour game or the most unsophisticated meadow romp. We are never free until some institution frees us; and liberty cannot exist till it is declared by authority. Even the wild authority of the harlequin Smith was still authority, because it produced everywhere a crop of crazy regulations and conditions. He filled every one with his own half-lunatic life; but it was not expressed in destruction, but rather in a dizzy and toppling construction. ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... the other.—Here we are!" and entering the room he folded his arms and began twirling his head round and round with immense rapidity, like Harlequin in the Pantomime when he first issues from his cocoon or envelope. Miss Fotheringay laughed with all her heart: a wink of Foker's would set her off laughing, when the bitterest joke Bows ever made could not get a smile from her, or the finest of poor Pen's speeches ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... away his glass). No, by all the treasures of Mammon, I should not like to go through it a second time. Death is something more than a harlequin's leap, and its terrors are even worse than ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... years later he was sent by Prince Potemkin to superintend a great industrial establishment at Kritchev on a tributary of the Dnieper. There he was to be 'Jack-of-all-trades—building ships, like Harlequin, of odds and ends—a rope-maker, a sail-maker, a distiller, brewer, malster, tanner, glass-man, glass-grinder, potter, hemp-spinner, smith, and coppersmith.'[251] He was, that is, to transplant a fragment of ready-made Western civilisation into Russia. Bentham ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... Then they lay a board between two boats, and on this two of the youngest and spryest wrestle till one falls into the water.... But all the fun's gone now. When I was young, there was different sport going. That was a sight! the corporation procession with the banners and the harlequin atop, and at Shrovetide, when the butchers led about an ox decked with ribbons and carnival twigs, with a boy on his back with wings and a little shirt.... All that's past now, people are got so fine. St. Knud's Fair is not what it used ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... into Golden Lane on the 16th of August. Pall Mall, however, was not lighted with gas until 1809, and it was really not finally and generally introduced into London until the year 1820. We meet with an excellent satire published by S. W. Fores, in 1807, wherein a harlequin is depicted sitting on a rope suspended between a couple of lamp posts. The lamps and the hat of the figure are garnished with lighted burners; the neighbours in the windows of the adjoining houses, the people ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... that this manifest brilliancy and Harlequin's-jacket character is essential in the color school. The essential matter is only that everything should be of its own definite color: it may be altogether sober and dark, yet the distinctness of hue preserved with entire fidelity. ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... the principal parts. The scene is laid in Calabria during the Feast of the Assumption. The Pagliacci are a troupe of itinerant mountebanks, the characters being Nedda, the Columbine, who is wife of Canio, or Punchinello, master of the troupe; Tonio, the Clown; Beppe, the Harlequin; and ...
— The Standard Operas (12th edition) • George P. Upton
... Harlequin stopped short, and turning to the public he pointed with his hand to some one far down in the pit, and exclaimed in ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... glance of the two darkest eyes it ever was my fortune to behold, as the beauteous Selina looked up from the perusal of her handkerchief hem. It was a pity that the other features were not corresponding; for the nose was flat, and the mouth of such dimensions, that a Harlequin might have jumped down it with impunity—but the eyes ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... thou art He. Hope, therefore, most, and cheeriest smile, at the very apsis and black nadir of Despair: for He is nimble as a weasel, and He twists like Proteus, and His solstices and equinoxes, His tropics and turning-points and recurrences are innate in Being, and when He falls He falls like harlequin and shuttlecocks, shivering plumb to His feet, and each third day, lo, He is risen again, and His defeats are but the stepping-stones and rough scaffolding from which He builds His Parthenons, and from the densest basalt ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... hair, they might have been taken for Furies; and it was only their crowns of vine-leaves, and the goblets in their hands, that enabled us to guess what they were intended to represent. Bacchus, very much resembling a Harlequin, followed with his tambourine; and after him, a body of very immodest dancers: these, as the procession moved but slowly, halting frequently, had abundant opportunities of displaying their shameless talent, ...
— A New Voyage Round the World, in the years 1823, 24, 25, and 26, Vol. 2 • Otto von Kotzebue
... as groomsman; that the first child should be called Carpezan or Sybilla, after the tragedy, and so forth. They would not quite be able to keep a coach, but they might get a chariot and pasteboard dragons from Mr. Rich's theatre. The baby might be christened in Macbeth's caldron; and Harry and harlequin ought ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... shall he begin Who would paint thee, Harlequin? With thy waxen burnished leaf, With thy branches' red relief, With thy polytinted fruit,— In thy spring or autumn suit,— Where begin, and oh, where end, Thou whose ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... profoundest emotions of trouble, do not fetter that exalted principle imbued in her very nature. It is true, her tender and feeling heart may often be moved (as she is thus constituted), but she is not conquered, she has not given up to the harlequin of disappointments, her energies have not become clouded in the last movement of misfortune, but she is continually invigorated by the archetype of her affections. She may bury her face in her hands, and let the tear of anguish ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Wells on July 4, 1806, was: "Aquatic Theatre, Sadler's Wells. A new dance called Grist and Puff, or the Highland Fling. The admired comic pantomime, Harlequin and the Water Kelpe. New melodramatic Romance, The Invisible Ring; or, The Water Monstre and Fire Spectre." The author of both was Mr. C. Dibdin, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... On the stage Harlequin and Punch were as usual quarrelling with each other and threatening every moment to come ...
— Pinocchio - The Tale of a Puppet • C. Collodi
... night of July when he made bold to climb the private stair and seek private speech with Madonna Beatrice. I can guess very well how the scene showed that night in the moonbeams—all the city stretched out below, a harlequin's coat of black and silver, according to the disposition of the homes and the open spaces with their lights and shadows. I can fancy how, through the gilded air, came the cheerful sounds of the dancing and the luting and the laughter and the festival, and how all Florence seemed to be, as ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... in Parliament, or seeking entrance to it, except this variously tinted Whiggery, this Harlequin of Reaction? Well, inside Parliament, setting aside the Irish party, which is, we may now well hope, merely temporarily there, there is not much. It is not among people of "wealth and local influence," who I see are supposed to be the only available ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris
... carried out in harlequin flannel surmounts a full brim of restful willow-green. Garnished with intertwined laurel and St. John's-Wort, and decorated with the tail feather of a Surrey fowl, it makes a comfortable and distinguished headdress for a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 22, 1920 • Various
... the coupe. Harlequin, and Colombine, and Humpty-Dumpty; shapes which came out of nowhere and instantly vanished into nothing, for all the world like the absurd pantomimes of his boyhood days. He kept close to the curb, scrutinizing the numbers as he went along. ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... with little exception, had been over heavy sand, and, but for the rain that had fallen, it must have greatly distressed the horses and oxen. As it was, they got over it wondrous well. In a pond of this river, Mr. Stephenson caught a great number of the harlequin fish, a circumstance almost proving that this was a tributary to the Maran. We found this day a new narrow-leaved TRISTANIA[*], thirty feet high, with bark thick, soft, and fibrous. A smooth narrow-leaved variety of ACACIA HOLOSERICEA was loaded with spikes of crooked sickle-shaped ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... other decorations, he exhibited a story from Ovid's Metamorphoses, or some other fabulous writer. Between the pauses, or acts, of this serious, representation he interwove a comic fable; consisting chiefly of the courtship of Harlequin and Columbine, with a variety of surprizing adventures and tricks, which were produced by the magic wand of Harlequin; such as the sudden transformation of palaces and temples to huts and cottages, of men and women into ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... lay at the entrance of a little canada already green with the early winter rains, and nestled in a thicket of the harlequin painted trees that gave it a name. The young man was a little relieved to find that Rosey had gone to the post-office a mile away, and that he would probably overtake her or meet her returning—alone. The road—little more than a trail—wound along ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte
... two of those floods that drowned me last year all the way from Wentworth Castle. I beg my best compliments to my lady, and my best wishes that every pheasant egg and peacock egg may produce as many colours as a harlequin-jacket. ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... calling the book 'Transformation,' which gives one the idea of Harlequin in a pantomime; but I have strictly enjoined upon Ticknor to call it 'The Marble Faun; ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... kindly pressed us to remain with her over Christmas. I longed to see the pantomime, having heard much from my cousins and from Leo of its delights—and of the harlequin, columbine, and clown. But my father wanted to be at home again, and he took me and Rubens and Nurse Bundle with him at the end ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... appearance in somewhat anti-Lord-Chamberlain attire, as he bounded on, with a wand, and struck an attitude, was suggestive of the Good Fairy in the pantomime; and his subsequent proceedings, when he didn't change anybody into Harlequin, Clown, and so forth, puzzled the unlearned spectators considerably. But Mr. TERRISS came out all right, and acquitted himself (being his own judge and jury) to the satisfaction of the public. His speech about Dover Cliff, generally supposed ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, November 19, 1892 • Various
... to throw confectionery and flowers on this day, but this time the day was to be made memorable by a shower of stones and bullets; this time they were not to appear in the harlequin jacket, but in their true form, earnest, grand, commanding, ...
— Queen Hortense - A Life Picture of the Napoleonic Era • L. Muhlbach
... feature of their general taste. They are too fond of the exhibition of art, and too regardless of the object, to which art should be made subservient. Dancing should never be considered as a mere display of agility and muscular power. It is then degraded to a level with Harlequin's tricks, wrestling, tumbling, or such other fashionable entertainments. The main object of the art unquestionably is, to display in full perfection the beauty and grace of the human form and movements. In so far as perfect ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... passages of Scripture were piously portrayed. Tobit and his dog figured to great advantage; Haman swung conspicuously on his gibbet; and Jonah appeared most manfully leaping from the whale's mouth, like Harlequin through ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin
... gone back to my glade again, and to the thin sunshine, which came a little earlier, now that we were deep in July; and one afternoon I sat in the mouth of the path, just where I had played the bounding harlequin for the benefit of the lovely visitor at Quesnay. It was warm in the woods and quiet, warm with the heat of July, still with a July stillness. The leaves had no motion; if there were birds or insects within hearing they must have been asleep; the quivering flight of a butterfly in ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... was alone in the room—he walked back to the potted rose bush and touched its buds lovingly, and stood leaning over it and saying nothing for a long time. And though the necktie that hung on its branches was a harlequin thing of red and green and violent purple, when he came to dress for that promised outing he put it on and adjusted it as tenderly, wore it as proudly as ever knight of old wore ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... back over his shoulder, he could see the black figure of the old gentleman coming after him with long, swinging strides like a man winning a mile race. But the head upon that bounding body was still pale, grave and professional, like the head of a lecturer upon the body of a harlequin. ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... the King being there to-night, very much crowded. Miss Gunning and her two sisters and a number of people of quality. 'The Tempest,' and 'Harlequin Ranger'; both very foolish to ...
— Extracts from the Diary of William Bray, Esq. 1760-1800 • William Bray
... any record of such an accoutrement as being that of a sergeant in the British army? and what was the purpose of the loose strip, unless it was to cause the blow administered to resound as much as to hurt, as does the wand of Harlequin ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... from among a wide range of different types. A variety of corn called "Harlequin" shows stripes on its kernels, and one ear may offer nearly white and nearly red seeds and all the possible intermediate steps between them. From these seeds the next generation will repeat the motley ears, but ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries
... said he, with solemn frown, "I tremble for each dancing frater, Like unregenerated clown And harlequin at ...
— The Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... pomarine jaeger; six gulls—ivory, kittiwake, glaucous, great black-back, herring and Bonaparte; two terns—arctic and common; the fulmar, two shearwaters, two cormorants, the red-breasted merganser and the gannet; seven ducks—the black, golden-eye, old squaw and harlequin, with the American, king and Greenland eiders; three scoters; four geese—snow, blue, brant and Canada; two phalaropes, several sandpipers, with the Hudsonian godwit and both yellowlegs; two snipes; five plovers; ...
— Animal Sanctuaries in Labrador • William Wood
... held. I was up on the bank lying full length on the sweet-scented grass, gasping in company with my first salmon caught, played, and landed on an eight-ounce rod. My hands were cut and bleeding. I was dripping with sweat, spangled like harlequin with scales, wet from the waist down, nose peeled by the sun, but utterly, supremely, and consummately happy. He, the beauty, the daisy, the darling, my Salmon Bahadur, weighed twelve pounds, and I had been seven and thirty minutes bringing him to bank! He had been lightly hooked ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... reason," says the Spectator, "is, that persons think it makes them look ridiculous, by betraying the weakness of their nature. But why may not nature show itself in tragedy, as well as in comedy or farce? We see persons not ashamed to laugh loudly at the humour of a Falstaff,—or the tricks of a harlequin; and why should not the tear be equally allowed to flow for the misfortunes of a Juliet, or the forlornness of an Ophelia?" Sir Richard Steele records on this subject a saying of Mr. Wilks the actor, as just as it was polite. Being told in the green-room ...
— The Book of Three Hundred Anecdotes - Historical, Literary, and Humorous—A New Selection • Various
... Italian parties; he had seen a picture on a fan labelled Villeggiatura—a simpering exquisite in a lascivious embrace with a frail beauty on the bank of a stream, and a garland of stripped loves reeling about a slim, diapered Harlequin. It was a different scene, a different world, from the Province; and its intrusion in the person of Mrs. Winscombe was like an orris-scented air moving across the face of great trees sweeping their virginal foliage into the region of strong and ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... make comparisons,—like Harlequin! No sooner out of one scrape, than we get into another; and all for the sake of those Big Blockheads (L'AMOUR DE CES GRANDS COLOSSES). What the Kurfurst of Koln has done, in his character of Bishop of Osnabruck,"—a deed not known to this Editor, but clearly in the way of snubbing our recruiting ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... to the level of a harlequin, to be laughed with, and laughed at. Who are my friends? Are they the idle boys who send me bouquets and never mention my name without looking unutterable things? Have I no tastes, no likings, no feelings, no emotions? In the name of God, was I created only to memorize so ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong
... their way to the palace. Gordon came out to meet them. The whole courtyard was filled with wild, harlequin figures and sharp, glittering blades. He attempted a parley. 'Where is your master, the Mahdi?' He knew his influence over native races. Perhaps he hoped to save the lives of some of the inhabitants. Perhaps in that supreme ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... passage from your mouth to your belly," added an elastic Harlequin, reaching an arm across the women's shoulders. "Come, Cantapresto, we'll help you line it with good wine, to the health of his most superlatively serene Highness, the heir-presumptive of Pianura; and where is that ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... from Braithwaite's face, leaving the chalky mask of a tragic harlequin. When he spoke again it was humbly. "You can't blame me for not believing you. You jump about. You say several things which seem to point to a definite conclusion and then at the last moment you change it. I don't know whether you do it to amuse yourself at my expense or whether it's merely the ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... especially pleased with a comedy called The Young Quaker; or the Fair Philadelphian by O'Keefe, a sketch that was followed by a pantomimic ballet, a musical piece called The Children in the Wood, a recitation of Goldsmith's Epilogue in the character of Harlequin, and a "grand finale" by some adventuresome actor who made a leap through a barrel of fire! Truly vaudeville began ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... great advantage; Haman [Footnote: Haman is the king's counselor in the Book of Esther.] swung conspicuously on his gibbet; and Jonah appeared most manfully leaping from the whale's mouth, like Harlequin [Footnote: Harlequin: the clown in early Italian and later French comedy.] through a barrel ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker |
